Move Over, WALL-E: Puttering Along Power Lines
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Inspecting power lines more closely would reduce the number of times the lights go out, but the job is tedious and hazardous for workers and expensive for utilities because the lines often run far from roads and through mountains, forests and deserts. Soon, though, the Electric Power Research Institute hopes to farm the job out, to robots.
These robots will not look like people. The institute, a nonprofit utility alliance, has built a prototype that more closely resembles a contraption, although it would in a way live in trees. It hangs from power lines and crawls a few miles a day, looking for flaws.
More precisely, it rides on a transmission-line shield wire, which is a plain metal wire that hangs above the conductors, to intercept lightning bolts. “I think of the shield wire as like a railway system,’’ said Andrew Phillips, director of transmission and substation research at the institute.
The robot is studded with sensors. One is a device that picks up the electrical disturbance that is produced from electrical arcs if electricity is jumping through the air. Another uses lidar, which, like radar, finds the range of distant objects, but using light instead of radio waves.
The lidar would show whether there is enough distance between the power lines and the ground or the trees. There is an infrared sensor that finds hot spots, which could indicate a bad splice, And it has a high-quality optical camera that would look at cables, towers and tower foundations for signs of wear and tear, and even spot encroaching neighbors who could have a backyard swimming pool or garden shed that is partly on the utility right-of-way.
And like all good robots, it has a name, in this case Ti, for Transmission Inspection. Ti can function autonomously, analyzing data from its sensors and sending a radio signal back if it finds something that its computer brain decides is amiss. Or it can function as a remotely controlled probe, responding to commands and streaming data back to a utility control center.
Ti, about 145 pounds and five feet long, is still in prototype. Engineers in Lenox, Mass., have been running it around a test track where it has to climb cables at angles of up to 45 degrees, and negotiate its way around towers.
The institute predicts that it will be popular because rules formulated by theNorth American Electric Reliability Corporation after the great Eastern blackout of August 2003 require better inspections. Today that often requires a helicopter.
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